Some comments on CTAN:info/tdscd

[Sebastian Rahtz]

K. Berry writes:
 > perl might actually make a lot of sense. gzip, too :-). (Then you could
 > gzip lots of stuff, if you start running out of space.) unzip, too :-).
 > netpbm, nah.

i'd say four things:
 a) i dont want stuff gzipped unless we are absolutely sure a
    particular application unpacks it dynamically (like man, info,
    whatever). in general, lets keep it simple
 b) if we had perl, we wouldnt need bash; perl scripts would be more
    portable anyway
 c) unless someone else has 3 or 4 days to spare, compiling perl on the
    (currently) 19 platforms is simply beyond beyond my capacity
 d) if we *do* get into compiling, lets have a "kit" of all the
    desirable things so that volunteers can just press the button. going
    back to the kind soul who possesses an XYZ running ABC-0.9 every time
    we need another little program (like the musixtex preprocessor) is not
    going to make them happy

but then again i dont want to be accused of (old British saying)
"spoiling the ship for a hap'orth of tar". clearly the moral is that
we should press a relatively limited number of a first edition of this
CD, and then get detailed reaction

sebastian